Comments on: Robots evolve to deceive one another

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:04:16 +0000

It’s the right DOI. Try again in a week.
PNAS, really annoyingly, often leave a gap of up to two weeks between lifting the press embargo on their papers and actually bothering to publish the damn things.

By: Jonathan Thornburg

Jonathan Thornburg — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:44:05 +0000

I can’t seem to find thae actual scientific paper:
* The DOI given (10.1073/pnas.0903152106) doesn’t resolve
(http://dx.doi.org says it doesn’t exist).
* google scholar “Mitri Floreano Keller robot evolve” finds
other papers by the same authors, but nothing in PNAS in 2009.
* The (very slow!) PNAS website’s search engine finds no articles
with authors Mitra and Keller, Floreano and Keller, or Mitra
and Floreano (I searched on pairs of authors, rather than all 3,
in case one of the names was misspelled).
Can anyone provide a citation, correct DOI, or (best of all)
online link to the paper?

By: jackie

jackie — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:03:49 +0000

we must kill miles dyson.

By: bobmighty

bobmighty — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:43:34 +0000

The man most directly responsible is Miles Bennet Dyson.

By: PaulC

PaulC — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:41:04 +0000

Ibis3: are you kidding?
seriously, are you that thick, or was that tongue in cheek?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:17:47 +0000

Wouldn’t it be more realistic if, instead of choosing the 200 best robots, you choose all the robots whos number of points exceed a predefined limit? This limit would represent death. Of course then you should let the number of point slowly dwindle, forcing the robots to eat good food.
This, perhaps, more closely represents the actual situation of all species, wanting to eat to prevent them from dying (wanting to score, to prevent the number of points falling beneath the limit) and only the living mating and producing offspring.

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:10:11 +0000

Hmmm – I accidentally deleted a lot of comments, which have now been restored (hence the suspiciously tight temporal clustering). To answer points I previously dealt with:
- Rob, checking the paper again, it looks like the experiment was a mix of real robots and simulations. Presumably the simulations were used to scale the experiment up to the 100 groups of 10 robots.
- James, 11.2% of the robots emitted light more than 50% of the time – so the population includes those who are doing it by chance, but also some that were always emitting light near food.
- Matt, I hadn’t actually seen the previous reports before writing this piece. They’re two separate papers though published by the same authors, one in Current Biology two years ago and one in PNAS now. Will check to see what’s progressed since then
- Everyone else – the experiments are still in their infancy, so no plans yet on looking at group selection, sexual selection or so forth. But please, keep your wishlist coming.

By: matt

matt — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:05:23 +0000

ambivalent academic: I also remember reading about the same thing two years ago. Probably because I’m not a science guy and not attuned to significant details, but it seems like they had a pretty good handle on all this stuff two and a half years ago. At the risk of going off topic, what takes so long for a science paper to go from the seemingly complete status two years ago to the complete version today?
Here’s a link to a story about the research they were doing two years ago:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2007/02/24/evolving-robotspeak/

By: Svejk

Svejk — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:01:57 +0000

I assume that the researchers sort of randomly mated successful genomes together–has anybody figured out a way to add sexual selection to this? That way mating preferences could also evolve, and some robots might decide they only liked the shiny ones. Or would that matter?

By: James Sweet

James Sweet — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:59:34 +0000

But I still like James Sweet’s comment that it would be interesting to see if you could create conditions where their would be cooperation between groups of robots.

I ended up writing a whole blog post about it. Although…
Ed, could you clarify the following statement from your summary?

After around 500 generations of evolution, around 60% of the robots never emitted light near food, but around 10% of them did so most of the time.

The 10% that emitted light near food “most of the time” — was this more frequent than random? If so, then I guess they already had evolved a small cooperative sub-population…?
I would find that pretty hard to believe because, as I described both in my comment here and in more detail on my blog, I have a hard time seeing an evolutionary benefit to the “cooperatives” under the present experimental setup. Because the population size is fixed from generation to generation, there doesn’t seem to be any individual benefit to altruism. If the population size were variable, e.g. by dividing the overall population into species as in my suggestion, then at least there is some benefit to the altruism (increases proliferation of the species as a whole, thereby giving cooperative individuals more chances to mate), although it’s hard to say whether that benefit would outweigh the obvious detrimental effect of having to compete for overcrowding every single time you find food.
But hey, I’m a computer engineer, not an evolutionary biologist, so what do I know…

What I find kind of funny is that they choose to use actual physical robots instead of a total simulation. What is the advantage of using robots other than the EXXTREME cool factor?

heh, I mentioned the same thing on my blog…